JIRA 5.0 Release Notes

22 February 2012

The Atlassian team is proud to bring you JIRA 5.0.

Overview

JIRA 5.0 connects people, teams and applications. Users can share issues and search results with each other. They can also mention a colleague with '@username' in an issue to call their attention to an issue. Remote issue links connect JIRA issues to objects and pages in other web applications. Activity streams show events from all linked Atlassian applications and third-party apps.

Even further, JIRA 5.0's new APIs are designed for developers who want to connect JIRA to other applications:

JIRA user — see Linking Issues for details on using remote issue links within JIRA.

JIRA system administrator — see Configuring Issue Linking for details on how to make remote issue linking available to your users by setting up the required application links between JIRA and other applications.

Share issues and mention users

Screenshot: Sharing a list of issues with other users

Screenshot: Mentioning a user in an issue comment

Need someone else to take a look at a JIRA issue or a list of issues?

View any issue or a list of issues on theissue navigator, click the Share button at the top-right (or type s) and specify JIRA users (based on their names or user names) or any email address of people you want to share the issue with.

Recipients will be emailed a link to the issue (or a list of issues 'shared' via the issue navigator).

Any JIRA users mentioned on an issue will receive details about the issue in an email message (sent to the addresses registered with their user accounts). The message's subject line will indicate that the person who used this feature 'mentioned' them on that issue.

Please Note:

You require the Browse Usersglobal permission to access the Share button or the 'suggested users' feature when 'mentioning' a user. However, if you know the username of a JIRA user, you can still mention them without this permission.

JIRA system administrators will need to configure JIRA's outgoing SMTP mail server for the 'share' and 'mentions' features to work.

Rapidly create and edit issues

JIRA 5.0 lets you create and edit issues and sub-tasks much faster. Creating and editing is now performed in a dialog box (rather than a separate form), so that you do not need to leave the current page or have it reload just to start creating or editing an issue or sub-task.

You can customise fields on the Create Issue/Edit Issue dialog boxes by removing or adding fields fields through the Configure Fields button. JIRA remembers your last set of field choices, giving you a personally customised dialog box that presents you with your most commonly used fields whenever you create or edit an issue.

The Create Issue dialog box allows you to rapidly create a series of related issues with similar options. When you select the Create another check box before clicking the Create button, JIRA creates your issue and automatically pre-populates a new Create Issue dialog box with your previous field values, whilst leaving the Summary field blank. Be aware that any attachments attached to your previously created issue are not carried across by this feature.

The Assignee, Project and Issue Type fields use 'autocompletion' too. Hence, you no longer a need to scroll through a whole raft of items to specify these fields when creating or editing an issue.

You can easily access these dialog boxes by typing 'c' to create an issue, or 'e' from a selected issue on the issue navigator or 'view issue' page to edit that issue.

Search for issues based on their history

'CHANGED' operator introduced

Introduced in JIRA 4.4.3, JQL'sCHANGED operator can accept the optional predicates FROM, TO, ON, DURING, BEFORE, AFTER and BY, and can be used on the Status, Assignee, Priority, Reporter, Resolution and Fix Version fields.

For example, this link shows all the issues logged against the JIRA project on our 'jira.atlassian.com' site, whose Fix Version field was changed to "5.0".

You can also create more complex JQL queries with the CHANGED operator by fine-tuning them with predicates. For example, the following JQL query:

status changed FROM "In QA Review" TO "QA Rejected" BY freddo AFTER startOfWeek() BEFORE endOfWeek()

will find any issues whose Status field value was at some point "In QA Review" but changed to "QA Rejected", by user freddo between the start and end of the current week.

You can use complex queries such as these to generate the 'Single Level Group By Report' in the screenshot above, which shows grouping by Team.

'WAS' operator enhanced

Also introduced in JIRA 4.4.3 was the ability of the WAS operator to work with the Fix Version field. For example, the following JQL query:

fixVersion WAS 4.4

Will find any issues whose Fix Version field was at some point (or currently is) set to 4.4.

Manage other users' shared filters and dashboards

Introduced in JIRA 4.4.1, JIRA administrators have the ability to change the ownership of or delete other user's shared filters and dashboards. A shared filter or dashboard is a filter/dashboard created (and hence, owned) by a user, which the user has then shared with others.

Since JIRA only allows the editing or modification of shared filters/dashboards by their owners, this new JIRA feature is especially helpful in situations where a user has left an organisation, but the shared filters or dashboards they created continue to be used by others within the organisation.

On the 'Shared Filters' or 'Shared Dashboard' pages, you can search for any shared filters/dashboards, or use the cog icon to change the owner of a shared filter/dashboard to another user or delete the shared filter/dashboard.

Only users with the Create Shared Objectsglobal permission can share their filters and dashboards with other JIRA users.

Administration user interface improvements

Following on with improvements to the Administration User Interface (UI) in JIRA 4.4, JIRA 5.0 provides further improvements to the Administration UI by converting forms on various Administration pages to convenient dialog boxes.

For example, the form for adding users is now a dialog box, which is accessed by clicking Add User on the Users page of JIRA's Administration area.

In addition to the dialog box for adding a new user, the 'Attachments' and 'Workflows' pages have been redesigned and the forms associated with these pages have been converted into convenient dialog boxes too.

REST API (with tutorials) for working with issues in JIRA

JIRA's REST API has undergone a significant number of changes and improvements to provide the following:

Create new issues.

Retrieve metadata for creating new issues and editing existing ones.

Delete existing issues and their subtasks.

Create remote 'issue links'.

Retrieve metadata from your favourite filters and dashboards.

Retrieve metadata about your permissions.

Almost all system fields and JIRA's built-in custom field types are supported.

Please also note that the we have changed the api-version name component of URLs for JIRA's REST API calls from '2.0.alpha1' to simply '2' (or 'latest' to use the latest REST API version available with your version of JIRA).

We also have a series of REST API Tutorials to help you get started using our new REST API improvements.

You might also want to try out Atlassian's new REST API Browser, which is available in the Atlassian Plugin SDK and can be accessed by adding /plugins/servlet/restbrowser#/user/search to the end of the URL for accessing JIRA (e.g. http://localhost:2990/jira/plugins/servlet/restbrowser#/user/search) within the SDK environment.

New troubleshooting and debugging tools

JIRA 5.0 adds several tools to help Administrators debug the configuration of their instance.

A number of email debugging tools are now provided to System Administrators in the new Logging and Profiling page under Troubleshooting and Support

Enable or disable mail logging

Turn debug mail logging on or off

Configure a logging level for a new package easily in the default loggers section.

For testing and troubleshooting LDAP connections, much more comprehensive testing is now provided, including basic connections, user retrieval, user membership, group retrieval, group membership and authentication.

New email handler wizard

JIRA 5.0 incorporates a new mail handler wizard that greatly simplifies the process of configuring incoming mail handlers for creating issues or comments from email messages.

There is no longer a need to configure a JIRA service and enter a complex string of mail handler parameters to handle your email messages. Instead, simply you configure your mail handler through a convenient wizard.

Improvements have been made to the layout of JIRA's mail configuration options. The configuration options in the Mail Servers administration page have been separated into two separate pages — one for Outgoing Mail (SMTP) and another for Incoming Mail (POP/IMAP) configurations. The configuration options for mail handlers have been moved from the Services administration page and incorporated into the Incoming Mail page.

Enhancements to the 'view issue' page

The 'view issue' page has the following enhancements:

The Issue Links section of the 'view issue' page has been redesigned to cater for remote issue links (above) and makes better use of space — the separate line used to group issue link types in earlier versions of JIRA has been removed.

The right-hand side of the view issue page now uses a fixed width. Hence, when the 'view page' is maximised on large, high resolution monitors, the association between field names and values is not lost.

In JIRA versions prior to 5.0, initially clicking any tab in the Activity section would reload the whole 'view issue' page. In JIRA 5.0, the content within each of these (non-selected) tabs only loads upon being clicked by a user and does so independently of the rest of the 'view issue' page. This modified behaviour provides more rapid access to the information on these tabs.

For plugin developers - the left hand side of the 'view issue' page can be customised via web panels. Hence, you can now insert your own custom panels anywhere below the operations bar on the 'view issue' page. The web panel location for the left-hand side of the 'view issue' page is atl.jira.view.issue.left.context — refer to the View Issue Page Locations page of the Web Fragments guide in our Atlassian Developers documentation site for more information. Also see our plugin tutorial for an example of customising the right-hand side of the 'view issue' page (a feature which became available in JIRA 4.4).

JIRA Add-Ons (Plugins and Integrations)

JIRA 5.0 contains a great deal of new capabilities for developers who want to integrate with JIRA, including new integration features like remote issue links and activity streams, a new REST API (link) and a stable Java API.

JIRA Customers will already see the benefits of these new capabilities:

Over 100 integrations to JIRA 5.0 are available (at 5.0 release), so many of the plugins customers depend on are already JIRA 5.0 compatible.

JIRA's stable Java and new REST APIs allow Add-On developers to build integrations to JIRA which will be forwards compatible with future releases of JIRA 5.x, so upgrades become even easier for JIRA customers.

Many of these new integrations use the new activity streams and remote issue links features.

See the full list of JIRA 5.0 compatible integrations on the Atlassian Plugin Exchange.

Other enhancements and fixes

When you access your new or upgraded JIRA 5.0 installation, JIRA launches the What's New in JIRA ... dialog box, which provides brief overview of the new features available in that JIRA version.

This dialog box can be prevented from showing up whenever you access JIRA by selecting the Don't show again check box at the base of the dialog box. However, you can access this dialog box again by choosing the What's New item from your user name drop down menu.